Bakso is a popular Indonesian dish, traditionally served with beef meatballs. Photo: Closari via flickr

Indonesian Muslims are outraged pork is being used as a cheaper substitute for the increasingly expensive beef in a popular meatball dish.

Producers of bakso have been raided and the trade ministry has conducted random sampling of the soup, threatening five-year prison terms to those proven to be mixing pork into the ostensibly pure beef meatballs.

The affair is being called the "Bakso fiasco" and the Imam of Australia's Zetland Mosque in Sydney who grew up in Indonesia, Amin Hady, says he is disturbed by the substitution.

"Eating forbidden food like this it affects your feelings deeply, perhaps it could stay with you for some time that kind of feeling that you have been guilty in terms of God.," he says.

"It could affect you emotionally or spiritually."

The Imam says under Islamic tradition, if a Muslim eats food that is not Halal, then their prayers will not be heard for 40 days.

But bakso makers have been out on the streets protesting the government's plan to curb beef imports,

Professor Bustanul Arifin from the University of Lampung in Indonesia says the price of beef has sky-rocketed in the past 12 months after Australia first restricted the export of live cattle to Indonesia.

The Indonesian government then restricted its import quotas in an attempt to develop a local industry.

But while the plan has the backing of the Ministry of Agriculture, Professor Arifin says the ministries of trade and economics are looking to relax restrictions to ease prices.

"It was decided 2013 will be 8,000 pounds of meat which could be equivalent to maybe 250,000 cows," he says.

"But there was a discussion that they will increase to about 105,000 of meat equivalent of imports, that's the controversy."

That would still, however, be below the levels of 2009 when some 750,000 head of cattle and about 70,000 tonnes of beef were imported from Australia alone.

"Anecdotal reports from the last few weeks is that up to 80 per cent of the cattle, in this case local cattle, going through some of the slaughter houses in Jakarta particularly, are young productive females, which doesn't auger well for the local herd." he says.

He says even with the best policies in place it will be hard for Indonesia to develop an industry large enough to supply the local market.

"The competition for land in what is a very productive country, it's very agriculturally and horticulturally very productive, but the competition for land is very strong.

"The capacity to breed cattle in open range systems is very, very limited.

"While they have an incredibly efficient feedlot system, which uses by-products from agriculture and horticulture, they're very good at feedlotting and finishing and fattening cattle, but Indonesia does find it difficult to breed the numbers of cattle that are required to fill the feedlots."

Mr Bowen says northern Australia is well-placed to support Indonesian meat producers if the quotas are increased.

"We are not in northern Australia able to fatten cattle, we're able to breed them, but we can't fatten them, we don't have access to the feedstuffs that Southeast Asian economies do," he said.

"At the moment those numbers of Australian cattle being sent into Indonesia into feedlots has reduced dramatically, it's having an impact on those overall supply of beef into the market.

"Subsequently we're seeing a rapid rise in beef prices from something like six dollars a kilogram eight to 12 months ago, to over ten dollars a kilogram today."